[Lcd4linux-devel] Gen III Cobalt Raq Support.

[David W S. <avi...@ai...>]

 Hello, I was wondering what I would have to do to get lcd4linux to work
with these. The Gen III units include Raq, 3 and 4 and I believe Qube 3 as
well. They are a parallel port connected device in the winamp fashion and
the port is 0x378. Anything I've tried so far with lcd4linux ends up with
garbage on the display and the winamp driver is the only one that even does
that. I also substituted a Sure Electronics DE-LM003 which is yet another
16x2 HD44780 compatible device and the results are identical. So far only
two things have resulted in clean text. Having the Cobalt LCD driver
compiled with the other Cobalt drivers and using the LCD Panel binaries
that write to the lcd with very boring perl scripts that don't show much
and the other was using perl scripts that drive the lcd directly with no
driver at all but perl has a bit of overhead. I'm involved in a very humble
project to run the IPCop firewall on these units since the i and r models
both contain two built in nics plus a pci slot. The Symantec Velociraptors
models 500 up through at least 1100 are also Gen III Raq units. I have a
few Raq 4i's and a few Velociraptor 500's and the only difference is the
lack of usb port on the Velociraptors. I do have a development version of
IPCop running on one where I made a version that keeps the entire build
environment intact but should not be used as a firewall, just to compile
and test. Getting IPCop to run on these by patching the kernel for Cobalt
support was easy and getting the e100 driver to ignore the hardware
checksum error that is all too common on 82559er chipped device was easy as
well. I like the LCD4Linux concept. I have gotten lcdproc to run on these
but the text garbages on me there as well. 
 I don't really like the Panel Utilities that are from the old Cobalt
sources even though I have gotten them to compile and run with IPCop. How
hard would it be to make a driver similar to the lcdlinux driver where it
uses an existing kernel driver? In my devel version, the kernel source has
the Cobalt driver sources in it. Not sure which way to go here.


Dave